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It's a general trend of vulture capitalism, or more accurately locust capitalism, over the last several years.
Investors want extreme ROI(Return on Investement, aka their money back and some extra), so they'll cut every single corner and monetize everything, and even run companies into the ground to make it happen faster. And then just move on to another company and to the same thing, with absolutely zero interest in long term income, customer retention, etc.
Because most services we are using aren't sustainable. They all bleed money.
That's by design, isn't it? Dominate the market while operating at a loss then monetize once you have attained monopoly. Like Uber's strategy. This is an awful way of conducting a business IMHO, it falsifies the economy. I honestly believe they should put severe regulations on this.
As a phenomenon you'll see a lot of people call it "enshittification." The term seems to originate with Cory Doctorow who writes, "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
The whole article on his blog is worth a read here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys. His Mastodon handle is @pluralistic if you'd like to follow his work there (woohoo federation!).
woohoo federation!
bro wtf we are actually living in the future, i just followed the equivalent of someone's twitter from the equivalent of my reddit account
Over-centralisation.
This kind of slow degredation of services is quite normal, however, this time around the wider use of these degrading platforms is hitting harder. Even 5 years ago, most communities had an IRC rather than a discord, and most ran a forum, or a community forum, with other info being on a wiki.
These days a lot of content that used to sit on a forum now sits on twitter, or on reddit. Discord is the new IRC, and so on. These separate services were a lot less convenient, but more resilient.
Odds are, we might see similar smaller communities pop up again as things get worse in the larger ones. Folks are pinched for cash at the moment, and so free services like neocities might see a boom as fandoms abandon larger sites (again).
Many tech companies were overvalued for a long time. Everyone was happy to invest and pump money into those companies because "those platforms are going to be the future and I want to be part of it when they are starting to make a ton of money". It didn't matter that many of those companies were not profitable because they always promised to make up for that in the future.
This classic idea is starting to break down a bit. Many Tech companies have become profitable in the meantime, but many of them also have various troubles like moderation.
So why are so many media companies making "shitty decisions"? Well, because from a business perspective, they aren't necessarily "shitty decisions", they are kinda smart decisions. Reddit makes money by gathering data and by showing ads. They cannot show ads on apps they don't control. So they have to handle a lot of traffic for which they get nothing back. That's why they are trying to push as many people to use their app as possible. They know that the hardcore oldschool community won't like that, but they are probably pretty sure that enough will switch to the app to make it worthwhile for them.
Meta is fighting to stay relevant as well. Facebook was the foundation of social media for a long time, but in the digital space, this can change very quickly, so they constantly have to try new things.
And if we look at games like the Sims, the game who really escalated the whole DLC thing, it's a similar story. From a consumer perspective, what they are doing is bad. From a business perspective, it's smart. And that's what it ultimately comes down to.
Companies' main goal isn't to satisfy their customers, it's making money. If fucking over customers makes them more money, they do it in a heartbeat.
They've also made a lot of shitty decisions. Reddit decided to invest in NFTs when they had cheap money. That's been about as successful as a lead balloon. That also burned a bunch of user good will in the process. Meta went all in on VR and the Metaverse. They've admitted that's been a bust. This seems more like an A and B with A being cheap money evaporating and B being bad decisions.
I'm reluctant to call the latest Reddit thing enshittification, but it really seems like they're between steps 2 and 3.
On a slightly different note, does any think enshittification will be the word of the year?
Thats just living in late stage capitalism. Everything you have now will be rented to you by a corporation in a couple of years.
They are doing everything in their power to make this the worst timeline.
It all happening in a span of months I think is sheer dumb luck from an entertainment point of view, but deep down the cause seems to me to be the expectation of continuous growth of profits on the part of a product free business model.
It's the lifecycle of social media sites. I knew when I left Digg 13 years ago Reddit would inevitably follow the same fate at some point. The problem we have now is that there are no alternatives of similar size nor established communities to replace the sites that are falling apart. Digg and Reddit were equal and provided an instant replacement of similar size for the exodus. Same with MySpace and Facebook. Now, the users of the big sites don't really have that haven to jump to and people don't want to spend the time building a new community. There is no Twitter alternative. Mastodon just doesn't cut it right now and the fact that actual companies use Twitter as an official mode of communication makes it harder to leave. Reddit is the same way. Every controversy draws users to alternatives, but nothing can match it's size.
They are all just cashing out because they thought they are at the point where the communities will literally put up with anything, and not understanding that the community is their most precious resource.
I feel it's like a sellout on stock exchange: once the first company started to heavily monetize, the others felt like they needed to cash out now, before "stock values drop" i.e. the internet users find different models of social media that make the corporation owned ones obsolete. Thank you lemmy! :)
only now? to me most social media platforms were shitty to begin with, or had become shitty long before.
I feel this is a matter of perspective. The average Joe whose concept of "social media" is Facebook probably has never noticed anything getting any worse. The mainstream users who just want to see funny pics and couldn't care less about 3rd party clients might actually be quicker to side with Reddit than with the protesters.
Twitter has never been attractive to me. Even back when its API was public (ancient history). Not only is their feed noisy and of poor quality, constantly swayed by "trending" stuff I don't care about, it also has always had you depend on a privative and closed source walled guarden. Things were much more open before twitter, when people used blogs to post their stuff instead.
Reddit might have been a bit more open once.. but it stopped being so long ago, this is not a change in behavior. Maybe this is an unpopular thing to say, but I'm actually glad this is happening. I think the API fiasco might be an overall good thing if it helps people get away from Reddit, and if so I hope Reddit does not backtrack.
The lie that eternal growth is possible has companies making really stupid moves to increase short term gains at the cost of long term stability.
I honestly feel like - and this is just my thought, no data to back it up - all the major companies or sites felt like they were the only ones around, there was nothing to replace them, so they could make whatever decisions they wanted to make.
Like when we all left Digg for Reddit - Reddit was already a thing so it was a relatively "painless" switch. With this one it's like... Musk took over twitter and I sort of heard about the fediverse but I'm personally waiting for Hive to get a desktop - but once Reddit started doing it's thing it was like "yeah I really need to move now" and kbin had a much better landing page than any of the other fediverse things I'd stumbled upon which really helped with the onboarding... And it's been nice watching it grow.
But yeah previous to this it was like...there was nothing else available so why did they have to care about what they did if we were "stuck" there with the decisions they were making anyway.
lol...and yet here I am on kbin so - yeah looks like that plan (assuming it's at all correct) didn't pan out entirely like they were hoping.
The VC gravy train is slowing down, so everyone's scrabbling around trying to find profit. Then running into issues because their business is built upon a foundation of unprofitable decisions made to drive quick growth.
The explanation is fairly straightforward. Interest rates are rising and cash is hard to come by these days. Many of consumer friendly features we have been enjoying have been paid for debt. Now that inflation is high and the fed is force to crank up interest many companies have to become truly profitable and so they start cashing in the user base that they have build over the last decade.
Companies in general are just designed to make more profit, that‘s it. All their decisions make sense from a business perspective, they are just shitty for us from a human perspective. This is why we need decentralised platforms which aren‘t inherently profit seeking.
Funny also how every time someone criticises capitalism someone shows up attributing all technological advances to capitalism. No. It‘s the people, under any economic system there will be inventions, it is small minded to think people only innovate or work out of greed, if that were so the entire open source just wouldn‘t exist and volunteering wouldn‘t exist.
It's because of Cambridge Analytica. They realized they could blast susceptible morons with hyper targeted political content and warp users minds into being foot soldiers for a billionaire class that doesn't give a fuck about them.
This is pretty typical for all big companies that take off there is a tipping point when it goes from agile and nimble start up to behemoth company that needs to pay dividends, only they have captured all the market share they can capture and may in fact losing people to other newer services. They're panicking and trying to make things look profitable before it all collapses like Yahoo and they can't sell it. Just my take on it all anyway.
That is the system we live in. Grow or die. I also curse u/spez. But I also think, if I were at his place (build a platform, sold it and now has to run it depending on investors): could I be better? Probably not tbh.
Saying it's just greed is not enough. You just cannot exists in this system without being greedy, you'll decline and fade away (either as a CEO or as a platform).
(If I would want to continue to run the platform, I'd probably just take the money and do something else.)
I think the main problem with these companies and the startup/tech bro culture (mostly in the US) is that they are growing for the sake of just growth itself, because they want to get their own. The original idea is to grow as big as they can, IPO, then sell it off. They weren't designing things to be profitable from the start. So eventually they all reach a stage where they are hemorrhaging money too much, and that is where all the enshittification happens (investors come in, they try to make it a real business now, but it wasn't really feasible to be a business to begin with).
VCs plain and simple. The entire system they operate within is almost perfectly at odds with how a traditional ‘real’ business would operate.
The net result is always some kind of cash grab, and whether the business survives is virtually irrelevant.
Private equity & VCs are IMO recklessly short term-ist with the ‘line goes up’ approach, with as ever, users & consumers & staff picking up the tab in one way or another.
A lot of technological flux going on right now, what with an entire generation partially trained to do WFH and job mobility that brings, the retirement of the tech-phobic boomers, the extremely tight labor market, Russian money going to "more important endevors" (which might also be why bit coin is down), and AI threatening to automate 80% of the workforce. Tech company owners are frightened and making random dumb or scared decisions because of it.
Greed.